No, they’re not. They’re really, really, REALLY not.

Steven D over at Booman’s place drew my attention to a New York Times piece on the Tea Party that makes me want to pour a quart of gin into a half-empty container of raspberry sorbet and call it breakfast:

The Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government.

No. No. No. A thousand, a million, a kajillion, a ding-dong-dillion times fucking NO.

As Steven D points out, the article goes on to detail Tea Party group ties with a pro-pollution, anti-workers’ rights foreign paper company and the movement’s big business funding. So why maintain the fiction that the rebranded BushCo dead-enders in patriot drag are “deeply skeptical” of big business?

Well, there are a couple of possibilities: 1) the Times is deathly afraid of being labeled with the horrible, horrible “L” word that NewsCorp has so effectively affixed to its hide that it might as well change its masthead to read “The LIBERAL New York Times.”

Or, 2) The New York Times is a giant media conglomerate and thus has just as much a vested interest in seeing the “populist” movement succeed in shoveling tax breaks to corporations while dismantling workers’ rights as the shady Indonesian paper company and the Koch brothers.

Like I said, I haven’t seen any evidence that the Tea Party gives a flying crap about corporate abuse of US workers. All evidence points to the contrary as Tea Party-supported politicians bust unions and shovel largess to multinational corporations. Hell, that dimwit Rick Santelli, whose rant allegedly started the whole thing, gave his speech on a trading floor (the scene of the crime!) and blamed our fiscal woes on “losers’ mortgages” instead of the Wall Street fat cats who actually drove the economy over a cliff.

You can’t make common cause unless you can arrive at a consensus reality. You can’t make common cause with people who are so wholly detached from reality that they believe that this country is in the toilet because of anchor babies and Kenyan anti-Colonialism and timid, corporate-friendly health care reform. You can’t make common cause with folks who aren’t troubled by the fact that we’re at Gilded Age levels of wealth inequality. You can’t make common cause with people who don’t recognize the problem with the fact that the 30% share of US taxes that corporations used to pay has effectively dropped below 7%, the gap having been nicked from the shrinking middle class.

There’s only one major party that even pretends to give a shit about the treatment of American workers. There’s only one party whose leader even pays lip service to the notion that corporations that ship jobs overseas shouldn’t receive tax breaks. And it ain’t the Republicans. If there is a truly economic populist element to the Tea Party, it’s past time they wised up to the fact they’re being played for fools.

I also believe that conservatives get to define conservatism and liberals get to define liberalism. As a conservative, I do not get to tell you what a liberal is. Nor do you get to define what a conservative is as you are not one, and therefore do not have the qualifications necessary to advance the definition.

He then goes on to insist that the “anarchists” responsible for some of the disturbances around last weekend’s London demo can’t be anarchists:

Today I saw a headline talking about the riots in Great Britain.

The lurid banner shouted that anarchists riot for government benefits.

Obviously, the least amount of literacy would allow people to understand that anarchists do not seek government benefits. If you go all the way to the left, you get some kind of communist command central authority—if you go all the way to the right, you get some kind of anarchist fantasy of utopia like ‘Little House on the Prairie’.

In fact, a liberal MP received criticism when he publicly endorsed these ‘anarchists’ who were tearing up London in hope of retrieving some government subsidy. Real anarchists would want to simply tear everything down to get rid of it, not as an appeal for more assistance from centralized government. Actual anarchists might be a little bit more like American militia groups who mostly want to get centralized authority out of their hair. Anarchy is about people who want to live off the grid. In fact, they wish there wasn’t a grid.

So only conservatives get to define conservatism, only liberals get to define liberalism—but wait!—Amherst must be an anarchist, because Amherst gets to define what anarchism is!

And when I engage him on this—with all the civility due to someone who I presume has mistaken the Labour Party leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition for a “liberal” (I presume that’s who he meant, but it’s a stab in the dark as Amherst never hung around to clarify) and has also attributed to Ed Miliband public endorsement of the activities of said “anarchists,” when Miliband was in fact addressing the massive (nonviolent) rally which took place before the disturbances and at a different location—what response is there from Amherst?

Crickets.

I see nothing of a “beatdown” in Betty’s remarks above. Did she call him names or describe him unflatteringly? Nope. She addressed his points and disagreed with him. Twiddle your thumbs as you await a meaningful rejoinder.

Over at TPM, there’s video (3:17) of one of their reporter’s interviews with several participants at a recent Tea Party rally in Washington DC. The video has also been uploaded onto Youtube (link).

If these folks are representative of the Tea Party “movement”, I see no basis for a discussion with them. Based on what those rally participants consider to be facts and valid evidence, I wouldn’t even know where to start in initiating a discussion.

And if these folks are not representative of the Tea Party movement, I’m gonna need directions to those who are. And to whomever makes a claim that one group or another is representative of these folks - whether the claimant be Amherst or anyone else - I’m afraid I’m going to need to see such claims backed up by reputable sourcing.

I’ve linked to this before - it’s a post by Medea Benjamin of Code Pink*, where she described what I would call some pretty good journalism done by her folks, in interviewing participants at a similar TP rally that took place about a year ago.

The TPM interviews, the Code Pink interviews, and a number of others on the intertubes and traditional media, seem to paint the same picture of these folks, and it’s not a pretty picture. More importantly, it’s a picture that shows these folks to be ignorant - perhaps willfully so - and mean-spirited. And as Betty and I and others here have commiserated about in the past, we have these critters in our own families, so it’s not as though we have to depend entirely on the Lamestream Media to know what they are about. They are often quite lovely in person, especially when they’ve known you for much of your life. But they can become nasty and small-minded at the drop of a dime, especially when discussing The Others.

The only Tea Partiers I can (now) only vaguely recall as being somewhat intellectually consistent were those present (IIRC) in the earliest pre-Santelli days of the “movement”, originating in GWB’s final months when the first bank bailout was passed. Back then, Ron Paul’s minions were represented at a high proportion in the movement. Well, them days ended a loooong time ago, once the Bushtards and associated wingnut haterz saw the early TP movement as a means to get the stink of the Bush years off of themselves. It didn’t work, and these self-relabeled wingnuts have only succeeded in crapping up whatever positive cred the original TP movement may have once had.**

*for the record, I personally place Code Pink in the same category as Mr. Howler: NBODA (Nuts But Occasionally Dead-on Accurate). Also too, these days I don’t think in terms of “good journalists”, but in terms of “good journalism”, the latter being something anyone is capable of, within the limits of their resources vis-à-vis the constraints imposed by the issue being covered.

**for the record #2 - I don’t have much use for the Ron Paul crowd. But I’ll give them a bit of credit by grading them on a curve, in the same way Jon Stewart “complimented” Bill O’Reilly once by noting he was the best of the sorry lot over at Fox News (Stewart to O’Reilly): You’re the thinnest kid in fat camp.